In the past, auditory masking and reading acceleration have been proposed to aid those having reading disabilities. See, e.g., Breznitz, Enhancing the Reading of Dyslexic Children by Reading Acceleration and Auditory Masking, Jnl. Of Educational Psychology Vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 103-113 (1997). In addition, Kershner et al., has proposed that a modified voice feedback during a timed naming task may improve letter-naming speed in a select sub-type of learning disabled children. Kershner et al., Modified Voice Feedback Improves Letter Naming in Reading Disabled Children with Central Auditory Dysfunction, Jnl. of Clinical Child Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 157-161 (1985). Speed of letter naming has been suggested to be a good predictor of reading comprehension. DeSoto et al., Relationship of reading achievement to verbal processing abilities, Jnl. of Educational Psychology, 75, pp. 116-127 (1983); Jansky et al., Preventing reading failure (NY, Harper & Row, 1973). However, Kershner et al. states that frequency modification significantly improved letter recognition speed in children with central auditory dysfunction but significantly had a disruptive effect on disabled readers with intact auditory functioning, concluding that “in absolute terms, the FM effect was small” and that “[a]dditional research is needed to determine actual performance benefits of FM as a remedial intervention.” Kershner et al., p. 160. More recently, researchers have reported running linguistic and non-linguistic experiments to assess whether developmental dyslexia (“DD”) is related to central auditory processing deficits or to language-specific processing deficits. See, Sapir et al., Linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory processing of rapid vowel formant (F2) modulations in university students with and without developmental dyslexia, Brain Cogn. March-April; 48 (2-3); pp. 520-526 (2002). During the non-linguistic experiment (which was run three times), the researchers had the subjects listen to synthetic vowels whose second fomant (F2) was modulated with fomants F1, F3, and F4 held constant. The DD subjects' performance deteriorated over the three experimental runs, and the researchers concluded that this result suggested that resource depletion or frontal lobe dysfunction may be associated with DD. Id.
In other pathologies, delayed auditory feedback has been proposed to treat certain non-stuttering speech related disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. See, e.g., Downie et al., Speech disorder in parkinsonism—usefulness of delayed auditory feedback in selected cases, Br. J. Disord Commun, 16(2), pp. 135-139 (September 1981). See also co-pending and co-assigned U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/375,937, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference as if recited in full herein.
Despite the foregoing, there remains a need for methods and related devices that can provide remedial treatments for increasing communication skills such as reading ability (cognizance, comprehension, and/or speed) for individuals having non-stuttering pathologies.